For your consideration

As requested, here are some pictures of sukkot from around town. We (S, Yule, and I) went on a little odyssey around town to get some pictures for everyone, before other people showed up for dinner. We did, however, forget to get a picture of our own sukka until it was too dark, and as I own neither a camera nor a camera phone (these pictures were taken on S's phone), I need to wait for her to come back up to the B-more to take the picture. But one is forthcoming, so not to worry.


This is the one at the strip mall. The stores on either side are both kosher resaurants, one is meat and one is dairy.


This one, when S got out of the car to take the picture, the guy came out of his house to tell her that his dog wouldn't bite her. But we also think he found her crazy, because she was taking a picture of his sukka on her phone.




And these three are all the sukka at our old school. It's off the back of the cafeteria, so the kids can eat lunch there from school. It used to be bigger when we went to school there, before they built the new auditorium. That got built in the courtyard where the cafeteria opens to, so that cut into the space available. Many of the decorations are made by students. The decorations on the back wall there include the decorations from the nursery school kids, one of whom is S's and my cousin. His is clearly the best semi-circle piece of paper colored in yellow to look like a banana.

Amusing Sukkot sightings

In honor of everyone's favorite Jewish holiday, I thought I would tell you about some sukkot around town. One of the kosher restaurants in town (that caters mostly to a lunch crowd) has a sukka on the sidewalk at their strip mall. I guess that way people can have their soup and salad outside in the sukka. There is also a sukka where the family, in attempt to make it just like their home, is flying an American flag from it, which isn't a combination one sees very often.

Flying Spaghetti Monster

Yesterday was International Talk Like a Pirate Day, and I'm sure everyone celebrated. But just on the off chance that you missed it, I give you the only religion to celebrate the holiday - the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. It was founded by Oregonians, so you present and past Oregonians can feel proud about that. Their eight not-quite-commandments are pretty good guidelines to live by. And if you scroll down to the bottom of the main page about the church, you can see a picture of the FSM billboard in Baltimore. I feel that the Baltimore Synod is composed entirely of Hopkins grad students.

Happy New Year

I just wanted to wish everyone a happy 5768. I know everyone is having a good time for Rosh Hashanah.

The beauty of the one party system

I went and voted this morning in the mayoral primary. (The Baltimore mayor's race is an off year election for a reason that no one understands, and when they tried to change it, the Speaker of the House of Delegates wouldn't let them because he didn't like the then-mayor, now-governor, and so the primary was 14 months before the general election.) This being Baltimore, a city that hasn't had a single Republican councilman since the Depression, the primary is the de facto election. In fact, in the election coverage from the Sun, the profiles of the candidates only break them down by position (there are also the city council elections), not party. Because there's no coverage of the Republicans. Candidates' campaign literature doesn't even say their party affiliation, since it's already known. And this election is discussed like it's the general election, since that only exists as a formality. It just makes everything so much easier, since now all the campaigning is done. There will be a little bit of reminding people of there civic responsibility come November, but no campaigning. Everything's just done now, with little mess or fuss.

this is so cool

A woman in England who got a heart transplant now has her biological heart in a museum exhibit about the human body. So she can go to the museum and see her own heart that was removed from her chest. That's even cooler than going to a museum and seeing a piece of art that you made hanging there (or so I would assume, as neither of those two things has ever happened to me). Check it out here.